Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 22, 1995
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Melrose Place, “The Big Bang Theory (Parts 1&2)” (Season 3, Episodes 31/32) [Stream on Prime Video]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: If you were of television watching age in 1995 and you weren’t watching the Melrose Place third-season finale, you at least were hearing about it. Season 3 was when Melrose Place went from being Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap opera that Heather Locklear rescued from oblivion to a legitimate pop cultural obsession, with its stars on the cover of Rolling Stone and its storylines parodied on everything from Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld.
The rapid pace of the show combined with its ungodly long seasons (episodes 31 and 32!!) meant that by the end of season 3, the show had burned through a LOT of storyline. Michael had already left Jane for Kimberly, left Kimberly for Sydney, left Sydney for Kimberly when Kimberly came back from the dead, left Kimberly for Amanda, briefly, when Amanda got cancer, and then had a one-night stand with Jane. Allison had been the good-girl doormat, then cancelled her wedding because of recovered memories of her father abusing her, then she lost Billy again, this time to Brooke, and then she became an alcoholic.
And Kimberly … well, the arc of Dr. Kimberly Shaw was one for the ages. Once a prominent doctor at Wilshire Memorial, Kimberly threw it all away on an affair with the married Michael, who repaid her by driving drunk one night and getting her killed in a car crash. Only she didn’t die! Secretly, she lived, only to come back a season later with a wicked scar on her head and concealing the fact that she was now crazypants. Only not concealing it all that well. She tried to kill Michael, tried to kill Sydney, tried to blackmail Sydney into helping her kill Michael, kidnapped Jo’s baby after earning her trust for like a day, and by this point, has struck up an unlikely romance with unscrupulous doctor Peter Burns. Only nobody knows that Kimberly is seeing visions of a scary Rumplestitiskin-looking man who is telling her to kill everyone. This man right here:
The two-hour finale had a lot to do with things other than Kimberly trying to detonate a bomb underneath the Melrose Place apartment complex. Billy got married to Brooke and realized that Brooke’s billionaire father hated him, which made him sad. Jane decided the best thing for her fashion business was to steal away the trophy husband of one of her biggest rivals. MTV’s Dan Cortese was playing Jake’s violent brother, Jess, and beat up Jo in a fit of rage. And, oh, poor gay Matt got framed for the murder of his lover’s wife, and honestly, I’m not sure how that one turned out? I hope okay!
But besides poor incarcerated Matt, everybody else on the show got moved like chess pieces into place, until the big moment came when Sydney and Michael found out about the bomb and then went door-to-door like frantic Jehovah’s Witnesses, spreading the news that there was a bomb and everybody better get the eff out. All the better to have everybody out in the courtyard for Kimberly’s big moment. Well, everybody but Allison, who was in her angry-drunk phase:
The entire episode is one big, thick slice of ham, but in particular it is a master class of over-the-top soap opera acting by Marcia Cross, who owns this episode from beginning to end.
Shows like Melrose Place were called “guilty pleasures” because we couldn’t get enough of them but were embarrassed to say it because they were trashy and gaudy and full of sex and bad dialogue. But they also gave us exactly what we were looking for: big, explosive season finales where anyone could have been killed. (JK, it was only the one-episode guest-starring wife of Jane’s new boyfriend who died, but still.) It’s been 22 years, and we can still name at least half of the cast. Guilty or not, that kind of staying power only comes from a show that is pure pleasure.
